Experiencing new destinations, exploring new cultures, enjoying new friends… travel is rich and exciting. While there are always new places to go, there are also some that require more than one visit. London is one of them. I recently went to London for my fourth time (second time as a solo traveler) and there was still more to discover because, you see, there is the London of tourists and the London of Londoners. When I go to this fabulous city, I like to enjoy a bit of both.

I like to see the major historical and cultural sites but I also like to explore the neighbourhoods that Londoners love. I find that this is best achieved by choosing a hotel located centrally but nestled in a community. This time, I stayed at Montague on the Gardens in Bloomsbury; it was perfect for this approach to the city.

Bloomsbury – a London of Londoners
Bloomsbury, as a neighbourhood, is known as a centre of the arts and education. London University is there and, of course, it is home to the famed Bloomsbury Group that included Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster. It continues to attract artists and is home to students as well as the wealthy.

At one end of the block where the Montague is located is Russell Square, a beautiful garden with a cafe that I can recommend. At the other end is the famed British Museum which is free to the public. Go a little farther afield and you enter more residential streets and more squares including Bloomsbury Square, Gordon Square and Tavistock Square. I loved wandering there, looking at the architecture and watching the people. It is very safe for a solo traveler.

Cool Hand Luke is just one of the many plays, musicals and operas on and around The Strand

Beyond Bloomsbury – easy walking to London Highlights
While I do use the London Tube if going farther afield, I prefer to enjoy this city (and just about every city I visit) on foot. Wandering south from the Montague I made my way to the Strand and London’s West End theatre district. From major musicals, to serious plays to the Royal Opera House, it’s all there.

Near the Opera House is Covent Garden, a great place for lunch and a little shopping. When I was there it was delightfully decorated for Christmas. After lunch, I ventured a little further south and walked along the Thames.

Returning back to my hotel, I had time to stop into the National Portrait Gallery and just a quick peak into St. Martin’s in the Field to see what this remarkable church is like. It was a full day, to be sure.

North Americans are not accustomed to fine hotels located in a neighbourhood environment, but in London, some of the finest hotels are not on main streets. Hotels like The Montague on the Gardens offer visitors a taste of the London that Londoners love.

Janice Waugh is author of The Solo Traveler’s Handbook, publisher of Solo Traveler, the blog for those who travel alone and moderator of the Solo Travel Society on Facebook, with almost 5000 members. She has been quoted in many media outlets including the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, LA Times and USA Today. Janice also speaks about travel and the business of blogging.

Let us get you into the Christmas spirit early this year while we celebrate the forthcoming opening of our new Alpine Lodge. We are giving two chances to win a one night stay for two people at the Montague on the Gardens.

To be in with a chance to win, help us complete our 12 vodkas of Christmas by creating a special Christmas themed flavour you’d like to see on the menu. We have 10 delicious flavours so far including Cinnamon, Spiced Apple and Candy Cane, we simply need a further two to add to our menu.

To enter please email winterwonderland@rchmail.com, or comment below with your new idea of flavour and we’ll pick the two best flavours to win:

• A one-night stay in a luxury room for two people including breakfast
• A Festive afternoon tea for two
• A bottle of their own flavoured vodka to keep

So get creative! Points will be awarded for originality of mouth-watering flavours that will help keep us warm while we’re in our Winter Wonderland this December!

Closing date for entry is 11th November 2011. Entrants must be 18 years or older. Prize valid until end of March 2012, subject to availability and terms and conditions apply. Festive Afternoon Tea will be replaced with Traditional Afternoon Tea from January 2012.

Go Alpine in Bloomsbury with Montague Lodge!

Dirk Crokaert

A wood deck is not just for summer. Here at the Montague on the Gardens we’re turning ours into a veritable winter wonderland – perfect for the après….without the ski. General Manager Dirk Crokaert invites you to wrap up warm and get yourself down to Bloomsbury for some Yuletide fun and games!

The Wood Deck at the Montague on the Gardens is one of London’s best kept secrets – a delightful oasis of peace and tranquillity in the very heart of the city, overlooking the enclosed trees, lawns and sculptures in the gardens of the Bedford Estate.

It is already the perfect summer venue, but what do you do with it in the winter?

This year we’re embracing the winter chill by turning our Wood Deck into a ski lodge perched high up in the mountains.

A screen of pine trees suggests a secluded clearing amidst a forest while snow machines, life-sized reindeer, snowmen, racks of skis, piste maps, lanterns and fairy lights all add to the feeling of being in Lapland. To help combat the cold, and the lightly drifting snowflakes, there’s a sizzling barbecue serving grilled bratwurst, mini turkey burgers and other delicacies. Roasted chestnuts, mulled wine, mugs of steaming hot chocolate and big woolly rugs will all help to keep you lovely and snug during the long winter nights.

On the deck there’s a vodka bar serving a selection of 12 different flavoured vodkas – one for each day of Christmas. A few shots of these and you really will think you are somewhere between Val d’Isere and St Anton! (Feel a little dizzy? It’s the altitude!).

So if you’re finding it a little hard to get yourself into the Christmas spirit then the answer is simple – grab your gloves, goggles and woolly hat and head for the slopes of Bloomsbury.

Dirk Crokaert

Ribs, burgers, wings, anything they can drench in sticky sauce – North Americans like to barbecue big time. It’s so much a part of their culture that they assume the whole deal must have originated on their side of the Atlantic.

The way they tell it the original Spanish adventurers who arrived in the Caribbean noticed that the natives would slowly cook meat over a wooden platform – the Spaniards described the process of smoking and charring as barbacoa. By the 19th century this method of cooking, with various refinements, had spread across the American South.

Because barbecuing doesn’t require expensive cuts of meat (why bother when you’re just going to slather it in sauce and cook it ’til it falls off the bone?) it became a dietary staple for impoverished Southern blacks. The first half of the 20th century saw a mass migration of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities, and as they moved, they took their recipes with them. By the 1950s black-owned barbecue joints had sprouted in nearly every city in the US.

Barbecue varies by region, with the four main styles named after their place of origin: Memphis, Tennesee; North Carolina; Kansas City; and Texas. Memphis is renowned for pulled pork-shoulder doused in sweet tomato-based sauce (eaten on its own or as a sandwich). North Carolina smokes the whole hog in a vinegar-based sauce. Kansas City natives prefer ribs cooked in a dry rub, and Texans … well, Texans dig beef. Eastern Texas’ relative proximity to Tennessee puts it in the pulled-pork camp, but in the western segment of the Lone Star State, you’re likely to find mesquite-grilled “cowboy-style” brisket.

Locals defend their region’s cooking style with the sort of fierce loyalty usually reserved for die-hard sports fans. Just as you’re better off not mentioning the Yankees to a Red Sox fan, it’s probably best not to proclaim your love for Texas beef to anyone from Tennessee.

However, if the truth be told, the idea of grilling meat in the open was around long before Columbus set foot in the New World – it goes all the way back to the point where our ancestors discovered how to control fire (about 400,000 years ago)

A Shish Kebab over coals

Just type the word Kebab into Google and the idea that cooking over hot coals is somehow unique to North America becomes truly preposterous. It is Persian in origin – invented by medieval soldiers who used their swords to grill meat over open-field fires.

The dish has been native to the Near East and ancient Greece since the 8th century – an early variant is mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey as well as in the in the works of Aristophanes, Xenophon and Aristotle.

Turkey has its Döner and Shish kebabs, while India and Iran have a wealth of regional variations, including the tandoor. Satay is popular in the south east while in Korea they have Bulgogi (literally meaning “fire meat”). Yakitori is the Japanese version of shish kebab. Nomadic Mongolians also like to barbecue meat using hot stones. In Hong Kong, pork barbecue, or char siu is made with a marinade of honey and soy sauce, and cooked in long, narrow strips.

Grilling meat over charcoal is equally popular in Southern Africa, where it is referred to as a “braai”. Then there’s the “barbie” downunder. Asado, or grilling, is considered the traditional dish of Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Chile and southern Brazil.

Around the Mediterranean meats are usually marinated in lemon juice and olive oil before grilling. In Alpine countries they have raclette where cheese is melted on a hot surface. Shashlik is the Russian version of shish kebab, while in Germany they enjoy “grillen”.

Spit-roast

So, finally, to London. Grilled food outdoors is incredibly popular here , so much so that as soon as the sun is out every busy pavement from Covent Garden to Chelsea and Camden to Clapham is packed with people desperate for a bit of al fresco – even if the setting is far from idyllic.

That’s when the terrace and wood deck at the Montague on the Gardens comes into its own. As the name suggests, it overlooks the gorgeous private gardens of the Bedford Estate. Green and peaceful, secluded and sunny, totally removed from the crowds of people and the noise of traffic, it’s a little corner of tranquil heaven right at the heart of the city. There’s nowhere better for enjoying spectacularly sophisticated barbecues and refreshing cocktails – eat your heart out Texas!

Every Sunday until 18th September, between 12:30pm and 14:30 why not join us on the Wood Deck for our very special Sunday Spit Roast lunch, with live music it is the perfect place to enjoy the sunshine.

Dirk Crokaert

The exhibition is full of surprising facts and fascinating stories. I hope these snippets of information will encourage you to visit in person – it really is an amazing experience! There’s also a video to whet your appetite.

The first surprise is that there is not one book, but many. Egyptians believed that death was just the first step on a protracted and perilous journey through the underworld to the ultimate destination of eternal life. On the way each individual would have to ward off a series of terrifying creatures, including vigilant baboons, an Ibis god called Thoth and the fearsome Devourer, with the jaws of a crocodile, the chest of a lion and the hind legs of a hippo, who waited to eat the hearts of sinners in the afterlife’s Hall of Judgment. Knowing what awaited them rich Egyptians paid for scribes to assemble a collections of hymns, spells and instructions to protect and guide them through safely. So, there were many different versions of “The Book of the Dead”, of which a fair few survive.

Scene from the Book of the Dead of Hunefer. Egypt, c. 1280 BC.© The Trustees of the British Museum.

The Book of the Dead was most commonly written on a papyrus scroll and placed in the coffin or burial chamber of the deceased. Books were often prefabricated in funerary workshops, with spaces being left for the name of the deceased to be written in later. They are often the work of several different scribes and artists whose work was literally pasted together. The cost of a typical book might be equivalent to half a year’s salary of a laborer, so the purchase would be planned well in advance of the person’s death.

The British Museum has an unrivalled collection of the Book of the Dead papyri, but many of the documents have never been on public display because they are so fragile and light sensitive – seeing them now is truly a once in a lifetime experience.

The “books” were used for something like 1,500 years between around 1600BC and 100AD. In addition to the unique works on papyrus and linen, the exhibition features superbly crafted funerary figurines (shabtis), amulets, jewellery, statues and coffins, all of which illustrate the many stages of the journey from death to the afterlife, including the day of burial, protection in the tomb, judgement, and entering the hereafter.

One of the biggest wow moments in the exhibition is the display of the world’s longest Book of the Dead, the Greenfield Papyrus, which until now has never been displayed in its entirety. Until March 2011 all 37 metres are on show for the first time. It was created for the ancient Egyptian Nesitanebisheru. In the early 1900s it was cut into 96 separate sheets to make it easier to study, store and display. It is sometimes known as the Greenfield Papyrus after Edith Mary Greenfield who donated the roll to the British Museum.

Egyptian Mummy

The book also explains why the Egyptians were so careful to preserve the bodies of the deceased. While the dead person travelled through the netherworld as a spirit, or ba, their preserved body, or mummy, remained in the tomb. The mummy had to be kept safe so that the ba could reunite with the body in the everlasting afterlife.

There were several possible afterlives. The dead person might travel with the sun god Ra in his boat sailing though the sky each day and the netherworld each night or they might go to the Field of Reeds, a landscape like Egypt, with rivers to sail on and fields of crops to ensure the dead never went hungry.

So, this is one exhibition you won’t want to miss, as many of the items will never again see the light of day – at least not in your lifetime. To make the most of this unique experience I heartily recommend our special British Museum Exhibition Package – after a full day exploring the afterlife you’ll be ready for a wonderful afternoon tea, and a good night’s rest in one of our splendidly luxurious rooms!

Dirk Crokaert

Now that the Montague on the Gardens has launched its new Cigar Terrace, overlooking the private gardens of the Bedford Estate, I thought it might be appropriate to provide some stories that guests can swop through the smoke.

The term “cigar” probably originated from “sikar,” the Mayan-Indian word for smoking, which became ‘cigarro’ in Spanish.   The word itself, and variations on it, did not come into general use until 1730, despite the fact that tobacco was discovered by Europeans over 200 years earlier.

Christopher Columbus is credited with introducing the habit to the world following his voyage of 1492.  Two of his crew encountered the pungent leaves on the island of Hispaniola, then again in Cuba.

The rest, as they say, is history and many larger than life characters from its pages have enjoyed the pleasures of the cigar.  King Edward VII, despite the disapproval of his mother, Queen Victoria, was a keen cigar smoker, giving his name to the King Edward Brand.  US President Ulysses S. Grant smoked an estimated 12 a day, but Sigmund Freud managed 20 – despite the fact that the psychoanalyst was well aware of their phallic symbolism.

Cigar and Brandy

Winston Churchill was rarely seen without a cigar during his time as wartime leader and is credited with introducing the practice of dunking one’s cigar in a glass of port or brandy.

Others were less enthusiastic.  James I described the habit as “a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless.”

A counterblast was delivered, many years later, by a journalist who described how he witnessed Havana cigars being created by rolling tobacco leaves between the thighs of virgins.   Alas, such the story has been debunked as poetic license.  Those that have bravely attempted this feat complain it is impossible to accomplish.  The truth is that workers may stretch leaves across their thighs, but they use a small wooden board for the rolling process.

Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara was also a fan, declaring that “A smoke in times of rest is a great companion to the solitary soldier.”  John F. Kennedy  was on the other side of the ideological divide.  However, the night before he signed his trade embargo on Cuba, the President dispatched his press secretary, Pierre Salinger, to acquire as many of the president’s favourite cigars as he could.  Salinger managed to buy 1,200 H. Upmann Petit Coronas, Kennedy’s favourite regular smoke, before the ban.  Shot the next year, the President never got to enjoy them all.

The advertising of cigars on TV was banned in the UK in 1991,and in cinemas in 1999, robbing the world of some of the funniest TV commercials ever to grace a screen.  Created for the Hamlet brand they can still be enjoyed on YouTube.  These four links will take you some of the classics.

Hamlet Cigars – Photobooth
Hamlet Cigars – Sir Walter Raleigh
Hamlet Cigars – Motorbike Sidecar
Hamlet Cigars – Tennis

These commercials were created by ad agency Collett Dickenson Pearce whose office was on Euston Road, barely ten minutes walk from the Montague on the Gardens.

Mustafa El’omari

The British Museum boasts nearly 6 million visitors a year, making it the UK’s biggest attraction for the third year running! So what’s the big attraction?  Well, there’s quite a few, actually – their collection database lists nearly eight million!

The museum is currently working with BBC Radio 4 on a series entitled “A History of the World in 100 objects”.  You can listen online, but for a real quick snapshot of the collection highlights here are my top ten picks for visitors who only have a few hours.

• Olduvai Stone chopping tool. Dates from about 1.8 million years ago, the oldest human made object in the museum.
• Rosetta Stone.  Features a decree written in three languages – in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. This enabled scholars to decipher hieroglyphics and laid the foundations of our knowledge of ancient Egyptian language and culture.
• Elgin Marbles.  Stunning classical sculptures from the Parthenon, a temple built in Athens some 2,500 years ago.  Acquired by Lord Elgin during his time as ambassador to the Ottoman court in Istanbul, then purchased by the British parliament in 1816 and presented to the museum.  In recent years the sculptures have become the subject of much controversy – the Greek authorities want them returned.
  

  Sutton Hoo Helmet. 7th century AD, Suffolk, England. This iconic object from the origins of English history reveals the story of how the first English kings were always part of a larger European community. © The Trustees of the British Museum

• Sutton Hoo ship-burial helmet.  This extraordinary helmet from the 7th century AD is one of only four dating to the early medieval period to have been found so far in England.  The face-mask is the most remarkable feature, with eye-sockets, eyebrows and a nose.
• Predynastic Egyptian man.   The body of a man who died more than five thousand years ago. Before mummification was developed around 2700 BC, bodies were placed in shallow desert graves, The sand absorbed the water that constitutes 75% by weight of the human body and prevented decay.  This body has been remarkably well preserved, even down to the hair and finger-nails.
• The Mold gold cape.  Workmen quarrying for stone in an ancient burial mound in 1833 found this unique ceremonial gold cape. Dating from 1900-1600 BC, it is one of the finest examples of prehistoric sheet-gold working and is quite unique in form and design. It was laboriously beaten out of a single ingot of gold, then embellished with intense decoration of ribs and bosses to mimic multiple strings of beads amid folds of cloth.
• The Lewis Chessmen.  Probably made in Norway, about AD 1150-1200 and found on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland.  Consist of elaborately worked walrus ivory and whales’ teeth in the forms of seated kings and queens, mitred bishops, knights on their mounts, standing warders and pawns in the shape of obelisks.
  

  Lewis Chessmen. Probably made in Norway, about AD 1150-1200. Found on the Isle of Lewis, Outer Hebrides, Scotland © The Trustees of the British Museum

• Hoa Hakananai’a.  From Orongo, Easter Island (Rapa Nui), Polynesia, around AD 1000.  Easter Island is littered with these monumental sculptures.  This example was collected by the crew of the English ship HMS Topaze on their visit  in 1868.  Islanders helped the crew to move the statue, which has been estimated to weigh around four tons.
• Mosaic mask of Quetzalcoatl.  Believed to represent Quetzalcoatl (‘the feathered serpent’) or the rain god Tlaloc, the disturbingly beautiful mask is carved from a single piece of Cedrela odorata wood and covered with vivid turquoise mosaic work. The Spanish friar Bernardino de Sahagún describes a mask like this given to Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés by the Mexica emperor Moctezuma II in the 16th century.
• Swimming Reindeer sculpture.  This carving is one of the most beautiful pieces of Ice Age art ever discovered.  Found in France, it is made from the tip of a mammoth tusk and is around 13,000 years old, a time when animals such as mammoths, reindeer and wolverines roamed Europe.

Visitors to the museum can make use of  the one hour, three hours and multimedia tours avialable for the very best experience and information.

Of course you can make it a special occasion and stay with us at The Montague on the Gardens, with our Art and Culture package which includes entry to the current exhibition, find out more…

Dirk Crokaert

Walking through Bloomsbury, the small and elegant area of London surrounding the British Museum, with its quiet squares, majestic Victorian facades and peaceful enclosed gardens, one would never suspect that the “goings on” behind some of these elegant front doors could have scandalised an entire country, and sent shock waves around the world.

It all began in 1904, when Vanessa Stephen, a painter, and her sister, Virginia, an aspiring novelist, began hosting regular meetings for other wealthy young intellectuals at their Bloomsbury home, 46 Gordon Square.  The Bloomsbury Group, as it became known, initially revolved around the Cambridge University friends of their brother, Thoby – it included historian Lytton Strachey, economist John Maynard Keynes, and writers Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf.
 
Sounds innocent enough, but to understand the outrage they caused you have to remember that they were living at the end of the Victorian era – an age renowned for its straight laced attitude, perhaps best summed up by the Queen’s tight lipped remark that “We are not amused”.

Though Victoria had died in 1901, attitudes were far from liberated, and the group soon began to attract thin lipped displeasure.  The early guests invited others, including artist Duncan Grant, who had been sexually involved with both Strachey and Keynes. Within Bloomsbury, these gay men found support for their sexual orientation at a time when the imprisonment of gay playwright Oscar Wilde in 1895 was still a very fresh memory.

It has been observed that the group, which tended to reside, work or study near Bloomsbury “lived in squares, but loved in triangles”.  And the triangles generally had a twist to them, demonstrating a sexual freedom and fluidity that was remarkably ahead of their time. Beginning in 1925, Virginia Woolf had a passionate affair with the dashing Vita Sackville-West. In the first flush of romance, Woolf wrote the experimental fantasy Orlando (1927), which argued that love and passion ignore gender, and that gender itself is fluid.

Although Vanessa Stephen married Clive Bell, the great love of her life was Duncan Grant, who was primarily gay and had been sexually involved with her brother Adrian. During World War I, they lived together at a country estate with David “Bunny” Garnett, who was a lover of both.

Strachey was gay, but in the early days of Bloomsbury, he proposed marriage to Virginia Stephen. In the 1920s, he lived in platonic bliss with surrealist painter Dora Carrington. When they both fell in love with the same man, Carrington married the object of their mutual desire, and the three set up house together. The cross-dressing Carrington had affairs with women, confiding to a friend that she had “more ecstasy” with female lovers than with men – “and no shame.”

Bloomsbury lost its soul and force when Virginia Woolf, who was plagued by mental illness throughout her life, drowned herself in 1941.   So, “what did the Bloomsbury Group ever do for us?”  Arty snobs or creative visionaries? Monied idlers or radical Bohemians? 

The taunt regularly flung at them is that individually they weren’t up to much as artists, writers and thinkers – whilst there is some spite in this, most agree that they were lightweights.  What, after all, did they live for?  Colour, warmth, romping children, piles of books, sofas, intellectual debate, music, gossip, hospitality, truthfulness, disorderly gardens and sunlit rooms.

At the end of the day, it would appear that there’s no need to be afraid of Woolves after all.  Indeed, they’ve largely become objects derision.  None more so than Lady Ottoline Morrell, the Society Hostess who was one of their number.  She was mortified to appear, painfully recognisably, in at least a dozen novels, including books by Osbert Sitwell, Aldous Huxley and, most famously, as the domineering and foolish Hermione Roddice in Lawrence’s Women in Love.  Some critics believe she was also the model for Lawrence’s most famous heroine, Lady Chatterley. She didn’t have sex in a woodshed, but her fling with “Tiger”, a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, was an open secret among the pathologically gossipy Bloomsburies. 

What makes this postscript all the more amusing is the fact that Lady Ottoline was first cousin to Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, the mother to the current Queen of England.  How amused would Queen Victoria be about that?!  But then she herself, it is whispered, had “improper relations” with her servant John Brown (played by Billy Connolly in the TV drama “Mrs Brown”).